464 - Steven Pressfield Explains Why Talent Doesn't Matter

0:00I get asked all the time what my favorite book is, and never once do I vary from War of Art. Ah, well, thank you. I'm glad it helps. Yeah. You're awesome. You're amazing. I want to start off with the reality of your creative journey, because I feel like in today's day and age, many of us suffer from this instant gratification idea. We want everything. I have people say, like, Marie, I've been working at this for three months and nothing's happening. I'm like, I want to just slide my head against a wall. You wrote for 17 years before earning your first penny from writing. It took you 27 before you got your first novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance, published.

0:38And it wasn't until you were in your early 50s that you actually started to make a living from your words. Is that right? True. So here's something you said, and then I want to hear your reaction to it. We cannot control the level of talent we've been given. We have no control over the nature of our gift. What we can control is our self-motivation, our self-discipline, our self-validation, and our self-reinforcement. What we can control is how hard and how smart we work. Wow, I said that, huh? I know, you say lots of good shit. That's pretty inspiring. So you want my reaction to that? Yeah. Well, I agree with it completely.

1:14Yeah. I do. I'm definitely a believer. Now, a lot of people don't write the way I do. I'm a believer in the muse and I believe that projects kind of come to us almost like assignments and that we have to follow them, or at least that's my theory. I only want to write what I want to write. Not everybody does that. A lot of people like to kind of write for hire. But in that case, again, not only can't we control our level of talent, I believe, but we can't even control what we're going to work on. I've always said that the books that I've written, I never knew I was going to write them before I wrote them.

1:52And I was always surprised that I'd look at something and say, I did that. You know, so I think the only thing we really can control is like what the Stoics say. You know, that's a kind of a popular thing these days that how professionally we work, how we control, manage our emotions, how we manage our expectations, how we deal with failure and, you know, how, what our level of aspiration is, how hard we're going to try, how patient we are. Yeah. So, yeah, I do think there is that culture of instant gratification, the celebrity culture out there. All we got to do is do a sex tape or something like that, and the next thing you know, or a YouTube, a clever YouTube video.

2:40And it's just not true. I'm curious. Did you always know that you wanted to write, like, was the little boy okay Steve. No I didn't I didn't and that's kind of what made it hard for me along the way because I wasn't so sure and I have a feeling that maybe a lot of people that are watching you Marie are in the same boat where you don't have that kind of clarion bell that tells you you know if you're Bob Dylan you know like at age 19 what you want to do but for me no I mean I wanted to be a writer But I didn't have any real success early at it. It wasn't like I was a genius in English or anything like that.

3:21So along the way, self-doubt was an incredible thing. It was like, really? Is this really what you... Because there wasn't that much positive reinforcement coming back. So that was a really hard one for me in my long, long journey. And I think it is for a lot of people, but you're just not sure. Yeah. Yeah, and I think that's an interesting point in terms of that distinction. I know there are several people in my life who were very clear since the time they were little of the thing that they wanted to do, and eventually they made it happen. For me, similarly, I had no idea. Part of my journey, I think, was because some of it was cultural.

4:03I didn't really know what I wanted. I'd never seen anyone do the thing that I'm doing now. Right. You really invented this thing called Marie Forleo that didn't exist before, right? I don't think so. Yes, exactly. But in terms of even the world of coaching or creating content, none of those things were really present. Growing up in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s, it was just not there yet. So I just really appreciate that you said that because I'm sure there are many people listening who are trying to figure out what their gift is or how to express that gift. And I think it's really reassuring to hear from folks who say, hey, I didn't have it figured out for quite a long time.

4:42But if you keep showing up and experimenting and listening to that inner voice, it's a really good chance you're going to find it. Yeah. I think that's about the only thing you can do and just keep plugging. And you know what's cool too? I just have to say, this is like an amazing fun fact that I just discovered about you, that your literary agent, Sterling Lord, can we talk about him for a minute? Sure. He's 98 years old. When we finish here, I'm going to have lunch with him. Yay! Yeah. He's 98 years old. And I just had a situation where he's old enough that he made the deal for On the Road, Jack Kerouac's On the Road in 1948 for 900 bucks.

5:20Dude, that's amazing. And he's your literary agent and he's still going like a champ. Well, I just had an experience with him where I left him a few years ago. Okay. And with my partner, Sean Coyne. And I just had a book that I've been working on really hard for the last three years. And it's had just nothing but negative response. And eventually even Sean gave up on it. And I was ready to, you know, I was really definitely bummed by this thing. And so I just maybe eight months ago, I called up Sterling out of the blue. I knew he was 98. I didn't even know if he was still working. And I just said, Sterling, I got a book that nobody wants.

5:58Will you represent it? And he said, hell yeah. Yeah. And within like two months or something, he'd made a deal. And it's very exciting for him to get some action going at this stage of the game. So 98. This is pretty cool though, but can we just trace back for a minute? Because I just need everyone to hear this. Because I've been talking about you. We've had conversation earlier on Skype many, many years ago. I talk about you every chance I get because I love you so much. I just need everyone to really not skip over the point that you've been working on this latest project for how long? And it kept getting - Three years, yeah.

6:32Three years. Even your partner was like, I'm done. And was there something in you that said, I'm not done yet? And that's why you called Sterling? Yes. I just couldn't stand it because I love this thing and I'd been through the mill with it. Yeah. But if Sterling hadn't come through, I don't know what I would have done. I was really at the end of the road. But that, I think, it's pretty typical for projects. They just take a long time. They do, don't they? To be done and then to sell them is like a whole other scenario. And it doesn't seem to be, for me at least, to get any easier. Yeah. No, I love talking about this because I have this notion for me of myself, I consider myself a bit of a turtle.

7:16Sometimes people look from the outside and they're like, where'd she come from? It's so fast. I'm like, honey, it's been 20 years so far and I feel like every little thing that I do takes five to 25 times longer than a certain part of my mind wants it to. Yeah. Yeah. And I try and share this a lot because I feel like many of us go through this. Yeah. It's like a kitchen remodel. It always takes twice as long or three times and costs three times as much. That's right. Yeah. That's right. So just, this is actually setting my soul at ease to hear this from you, knowing how much admiration and how much experience you have in this game to be like, it actually still happens this way.

7:55So I want to dive into resistance because I feel like it's a cornerstone of your work. For those who don't know, which I don't know who you are or what rock you've been living under, can you share your definition of resistance with us? Resistance with a capital R for me. If this were your keyboard here and you were going to sit down to write a novel or a screenplay or something, and you sat down the first day and it was blank, radiating off that screen like radioactive magma would be a negative force saying, let's not do this today. Let's go have a drink. Let's go to the beach. Let's do something else.

8:31And it also would say things like, who do you think you are to tackle this project? You have no experience. Who cares about your ideas? Everything's been done before. It's all of those self-sabotage things. There seems to be a force in the world that is a negative force against anything that we, any dream that we would have. An analogy that I always use is if the dream is a tree, resistance is the shadow. And as soon as the tree appears, the shadow appears, right? So it's that negative force that prevents us or is trying to prevent us. And it seems to me that overcoming resistance is far more important than talent or anything else.

9:21Yes. Any gift. There are a million people who have talent, but it's a very, very few that can sit down and take it all the way from A to Z. Yes. Or do what you've done here. You know, here we have this whole setup here. People can't see it, but there's a bunch of people out here. There's all kinds of stuff, you know. Yeah. And that you have really created that. That didn't exist. It wasn't like that was a job category that you applied for. Right. And I think that's the same thing. Even if somebody is going to be a writer or a filmmaker, they're going to be a specific type of writer or filmmaker that probably doesn't exist right now.

9:58Even like YouTube didn't exist a little while ago. So that ability to overcome that resistance, that self-sabotage and that self-doubt, in my opinion, is way more important than talent. I agree with you 10 ,000%. And I'm curious if you've noticed the nature of resistance in your experience. Has it shifted for you over your career? So for example, for me, when I sit down at the blank page for this show, I've written you. I'm working on putting the finishing touches on my book. The thing is kicking my ass from here to Sunday. And I consider myself an extremely hard worker, very diligent, overcome that resistance, but it's like it doesn't seem to get easier.

10:46No, it never gets easier. In fact, I think resistance is so diabolical. It really has its own intelligence. It's like the alien that keeps evolving from this little thing. And so that even at my stage of the game where I've done it a million times, it comes up with more subtle rationalizations and self-rationalizations to kind of trick me into taking a break or not doing it. But it never goes away and never gets any easier, I'm sorry to say. Yeah. No, actually, I love this because I feel like, and we're going to talk about this in a little bit, but there's so much power in understanding a bit of what's coming at you.

11:31Yes. It's almost like once you understand that, you can beat it. Yes. So I love that you hit upon this notion of how diabolical it is in its shape-shifting nature. So I'll say this. I remember how resistance had a certain tenor and tone, and it said certain things at the beginning. A lot of my self-doubt had to do with like – and this is – again, I'm going to roll my eyes at myself, people. If you've heard this before, forgive me. But starting a coaching business as a life coach as a 23-year-old, I was like, who the hell is going to hire a 24-year-old? You haven't even lived life yet. This is the dumbest idea ever.

12:08How can you be smart and have this dumb idea at the same time? This was nuts. But I would have never gotten here today. But today, it sounds different. So today my resistance will sound something like, oh, well now I have more to live up to because I've been doing this. So I just want to say this because I think people have a mistaken notion that they're going to arrive at some point or then it's going to be easy. And they're not going to hear those voices. Where's the camera? All of them. You're never going to arrive at that point. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I love these conversations because I feel like sometimes there is this veil or people have these mistaken notions about folks that are just in the game grinding it out there and they feel like they have some magical mystical ability that they don't.

12:49And it's not true. Not true. It's just not true. And to look at it in the positive way, resistance to me is sort of like the villain in a movie. Yeah. If there were no villain, there'd be no movie. So resistance is sort of is, gives meaning to everything. If it was just there and all he had to do was pick it up, what would be the point of that? And there's no great stories to tell then too. Yeah. Right? So resistance really gives significance, I think, to the fact that it is so hard. Yeah. I love it. Let's talk about turning pro. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've been on stage, I've had War of Art with me, and I've read the difference between like an amateur and a pro, and I've just read it down.

13:36It's like, you guys got to go this. So for those who don't know, what does turning pro mean? Well, if you start with the idea of resistance and that there is such a thing, then the next question is, how do you defeat it? And I think there's two ways that, two paths that we go down that are wrong paths or paths that don't help us. One is we think that if we're feeling resistance, we're wrong, quote unquote wrong. So we need to become right. We need to change something that way. And I don't think that's true at all. The other thing when we think of we have resistance is we think, oh, we're sick, right?

14:15Or we need to heal. We need to somehow find the cure and then we'll get over it. And I don't think either of those ways work of thinking because they're self-judgmental. They put you down. It's like in training, you know, in the gym. Yeah. You know, if you have a bad day, you can't say to yourself, I'm a loser, I'm a bum, I'm not an athlete. You just have to say, well, that was a bad day and I'm going to, you know, go bad at the next rate. But anyway, the concept of turning pro or the idea that there's such a thing as an amateur and there's such a thing as a professional and that amateurs have amateur habits and professionals have professional habits and that why people get defeated by resistance, in my opinion, is they're thinking like amateurs.

14:57I certainly know that's the way I was. Yes. And if you're an amateur, you're in it kind of for fun. You're sort of a dabbler. You think, oh, well, today I'll do it, right? You're a weekend warrior. When adversity comes, you fold in the face of adversity. If there's anything in your life that is a serious problem, you'll let that take over your whole life. It's sort of, if we think of it in terms of athletes, it's like an athlete that's injured. If LeBron James has got problems with his knee, he somehow plays hurt. So the professional attitude is a whole other different thing. I mean, you're a pro.

15:33Look at you. Look at this thing here. And a pro gets up every morning and does the work, doesn't take days off. Or if they do, they only take them off so they can come back Refreshed. Stronger the next time. That's right. And when a pro hits adversity, they just simply rally in the face of it and kind of use it in their own way. If a pro is hurt, they play hurt. And it's a whole different mindset. And so to me, that was sort of what really helped me overcome resistance. It was just to start to flip that switch in my mind and say, I'm a pro. I'm not an amateur. I'm a pro. And when I want to quit or I want to back off something, I just say to myself, would Kobe Bryant do this?

16:20Would Tom Brady do this? I'm sorry, all you people who hate the Patriots. I do too. But in any event, I do think to think of yourself as a professional instead of an amateur is a big, big plus. It's huge. And I love you talk about it. A really easy way to see this is how we show up in our day jobs, right? If we have day jobs. Yeah, right. It's like you just show up and you do the work no matter what. And I think about it this way. We have a program that's called B-School. I think I've told you about it before. And we've had 44 ,000 people so far go through it. And I often answer questions and they'll be like, okay, what's happening with your business?

17:00And I try and help them navigate the best I can just to give a little perspective. And then I'm like, how often are you publishing your newsletter? Well, you know, I publish it like once or twice and then I get bored or then I forget and then I come back and I'm like, it's consistency. And I wanted to bring this up because I feel like that notion of you show up no matter what is half of, it's actually all of how everything I've created gets done. I'm sure that's true. That's how everything gets done, right? Right, it's how everything gets done. It's like you don't necessarily always feel like it, but you show up and you get it, you make it happen.

17:33Yeah. And I love that notion because it's meant the world to me how you explain the difference between an amateur and a pro. And I just want to make some clarifications because, again, I can hear – I've developed this gift over time of hearing the audience, but what about this? What we're saying in terms of being a professional, it's like we don't want you to hurt yourself. When Steve was saying play injured, it's not about putting yourself out. There's an essence, I think, in each of us where you take a look and you go, I got this. I can do this. this might be hard. There's been times in our business where it's required us doing a shoot over the weekend where, you know what?

18:09Everything goes to hell. Technology breaks. We're shooting in here and there's helicopters and we all have to stay a couple more hours. It's like, no one's whining or crying and going, I can't. They just do it. And that's, I think, part of that spirit. Like you're saying, Marie, you might've said it so fluidly that it went over people's heads. When we work in a real job, we're already pros in that job. We do show up. The reason we're pros is the job enforces it on it, right? They'll fire us if we don't show up every day. But then when people leave that job and go off on their own to try to be a writer or an artist of some kind, they tend to drop that whole attitude and they think, well, I don't have to do it.

18:54It's Monday. I don't have to go in because I'm not, but you do have to go in. And that's really the secret if there is such a thing. I think too, there's another aspect that you've written about. Self-validation is another quality of a professional. And you said that's a big word and maybe it's hard to understand. But it's about somewhere finding the ability to judge your own stuff. Now, how do you do that, Marie? Let me ask you that. Oh, gosh. It is hard as hell. So I have a couple of different ways that I do it. There are times when I feel like it depends on the project and the context. But if I'm writing, let's say, an episode of MarieTV, I'll often do like a couple of first drafts on my own.

19:32If it's not an interview, if it's like something straight to camera. And I'm either answering a question or there's a topic I want to riff on. And I know because you probably know this, a lot of my stuff, there's like skits and sketches because I have this weird sense of humor and I build in all these things. And so I'll do a couple of passes on my own and then I have to ping out to someone else. I have to either have a member of Team Forleo or someone else go, okay, can we go through this together? Because I think 60 or 70 % of this is working, but I know I'm missing the mark, but I don't know if I can see, you know what I mean, how to thread that needle.

20:07That's why I want to ask you, because in a way, you're the product. So it's very hard, I would think, to look at yourself - Objectively. Objectively and pull back from it. I mean, do you do it just by having other people give you feedback? I do. And then I think what I've been able to do over the years is surround myself with folks that I really trust so that if we need to... I call them creative like boxing matches. I get into them with my creative director. I'll get into them with people on the team where I'm like, okay, I really believe in this. And they have eyes on different lenses of the business.

20:42Like, oh, let's just use a current one. Like, is that even appropriate? Because things in culture change so fast. I would never want to hurt anyone unintentionally. I don't want things to get taken off topic and like go into this strange place that's nothing I intended. So sometimes we'll do battle, but I trust them and they trust me and I feel like we can go to the mat. But ultimately, it's my call. When it comes to now book writing, I'm curious to hear your process on it. I feel like there's certain parts for me and I would love to hear how you work with Sean or anyone else. There's been parts in this book I'm like, I don't know if it's any good.

21:21Yeah. It's all shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like I took my stack, threw it up in the air, and I'm like, can someone help me figure it out? Yeah. Well, my partner, Sean Coyne, who was my original editor on Gates of Fire and also was the publisher of The War of Art. Yes. I'm so lucky that I have somebody that I really trust and that I can give him a pile of pages and he'll give me feedback that I believe. Yes. That's a key piece. I don't want to interrupt you, but for everyone listening, two things I heard from both of us, people we trust. Yeah. Someone we trust their feedback because - And they're hard to find.

21:58They're very hard to find because they may be, that other person may be smart, intelligent, talented, but if there's not like a soul alignment, I feel, or like a philosophical - Or somebody that just gets you or gets what you're trying to do. Yes. Yes. their feedback can kind of send you. It's happened to me before where it's like, I get in a creative cul-de-sac over here. I'm like, wait, this is so far away from who I am. Yeah. I want to say one thing about writer's groups where people give you feedback. I'm completely opposed to that. I think that can be the most destructive thing because you're getting feedback from other people who don't know what they're doing either.

22:38That's like the blind leading the blind. Yeah. And also the whole concept of jealousy and all that kind of stuff that goes. So to me, it's really important to find somebody that you really trust. But beyond that, like you were saying, Marie, it's self-validation. In the end, the bottom line, being a professional, I think, and going away from being an amateur is like also going from working in a job to being an entrepreneur, to being completely on your own. And when you're in a job or you're in a situation where you have a mentor or a boss or something, you look to that external voice to tell you oh that's good you did it right right we've all done had jobs where we take something into a boss and they look at it and then they mark it up and they give it back to you know and as you walk into the boss you're completely giving away your power you know that may be a good thing when you're young and you're learning but at some point you do have to sort of acquire the ability or teach yourself to read your own stuff and know whether it's good enough or not.

23:39And I don't know if there's any way to do that other than experience. And even then, you still need a great eye from somebody else. But self-validation is very important, not looking to other people to... Because they always tell you it stinks. I want to talk just for a minute, one more thing on going pro before we get into some tactics. I loved you talk about how your day changes when you turn pro. And I think that that's so practical for us because one of the things that folks struggle with, especially when they're going out on a creative project or becoming a freelancer or trying to become an entrepreneur or a business owner is like, whoa, if I don't have to show up for a J-O-B, I got all this free time.

24:25So you wrote, it changes what time we go to bed and what time we get up. It changes how we organize our day. It changes what we read and what we feed our bodies. The amateur tweets, the pro works. And I was like, Steve Pressfield just took me to church on that one. But that certainly is true. Yes. Because again, when we were working in a factory, our day was structured for us by the factory, right? You got to show up at 725 on the whistle, you know, and you can have lunch from 1130 to bump it up and up and up. But as soon as we're on our own as artists, then we have to structure our idea. And the reason I'm sure that you go to the gym is because you found that that helps in some way.

25:10Yeah. I find my physical body is a huge creative channel. And when I disconnect and spend too much time up here, I'm done. Yeah, me too. Totally done. What you eat, how much sleep you get. Yes. All those things. I think it's in The War of Art. It might be in Turning Pro. I have all of them. Where I talk about Roseanne Cash's moment that comes from her book, Composed. And if you haven't read that book, I highly recommend it. But she had a, her sort of moment, she was already successful. She had a dream. I won't go into the dream because it's, you know, we'll save time. But the bottom line is when she woke up from this dream, the dream sort of kicked her in the ass and just said to her, you are an amateur.

25:53You are a dilettante. I don't care if you've had four number one hits. You're not writing songs. You're just covering other people's material. You're not living up to what your talent is. And she said in the book composed, she said, I changed everything about the way I was. You know, I changed what time I got up in the morning. I changed how I took care of my body. I started going to studying painting because I wanted to see how you express yourself without words, without music. And then she locked on to certain habits that she had, bad habits like daydreaming, like going off. and she would sort of teach herself to check herself and stop herself when she started doing that thing.

26:29And then she elevated her level of aspiration. She said, the next album, I'm going to write either every song or co-write every song. So that's sort of how she restructured her day, not just her day, but her week, her month, her year, her whole life. And that's another sort of way of saying she turned pro, even though she was already a success, but not to the level that she wanted to be. I think that's such a great distinction because one of the kind of dangerous areas we have to watch out for, I believe, especially when we start to get whether it's some recognition or financial success or whatever that looks like for you, is this idea like, oh, I can kind of sit back.